


she doesn’t draw what she sees (she draws what she hears)

by redvelvetfics



Category: Red Velvet (K-pop Band)
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-07
Updated: 2016-05-07
Packaged: 2018-06-06 20:34:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,176
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6768967
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/redvelvetfics/pseuds/redvelvetfics
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>seulgi draws to keep order but there’s a misplaced mixtape cover that sends her towards wendy, and so she learns how to listen and draw with her heart instead.</p>
            </blockquote>





	she doesn’t draw what she sees (she draws what she hears)

**Author's Note:**

> written by njfchy (LJ)/bloodscrools (AFF)  
>  **Prompt:** #117  
>  **Pairing:** Seulgi/Wendy  
>  **Rating:** PG  
>  **Author’s Note:** half-heartedly inspired and for the girl who gave me a pseudo-mixtape. i love the ways music and visual arts bring people together  & i hope this story is reminiscent of that :)

zephyrs dance between strands of black shoulder-length hair, and as the breeze travels down the slender neck slightly covered with a sheen of perspiration, fingers gripped firmly around a charcoal pencil dance with swift strokes on a blank canvas, as if the wind is gently nudging her to draw, draw, draw.

seulgi sits on a small mat, slightly worn out by how often she uses it, her back straight against the tree as she glances down to her sketchpad and then up again to the bustling landscape before her. it's lunch time, and she sees students whirling past her like a hurricane, a cacophony of boisterous laughter and words jumping out at her ringing in her ears, feels a slight discomfort at the frenzy of it all, and feels the need to pin it down, to press it against the whites of her paper to stop it - a raucous moment of whatever she sees transforming to a beautiful ordered piece she conjures with her own hand. it is a lot like seulgi. while many artists sketch fleeting moments like this quickly, before it escapes their eyes and their minds, an almost haphazard yet surrealist scene in their sketchpads, seulgi watches, heartrate rising with quick raps against her hollow chest, shuts her eyes momentarily and slows the frenzied scene in her mind. she freezes the scene, realigns the elements in the scene so that it creates an order of its own, _ahh_ , her heartrate slowing down, the rush in oxygen fills her head as she exhales in relief: none of that frenzied blur and din, just her way of placing peace in what had lain in front of her. and so she sketches it out, less haphazard, she thinks, but also a lot more distant.

the noise doesn't reach her ears, ears protected with the soft cushions of her headphones as it cups the rims of her ears. the perfect ensemble of acoustic guitar and the duo's voices weaves its way into wendy's ears, her eyes closed as she imagines herself in the middle of a woodland, laying down as sunlight filters through the leaves, a peace that comes with the green leaves playing with the golden rays in out back forth, forgetting the sheen of perspiration that sticks to her clothes during lunch time in school. she listens as her mixtape glides from the paper kites' bloom to the honey trees' to be with you, imagines the rays of the sun being replaced with a pair of deep brown eyes that looks deeply into her own, wendy no longer feels the damp dense dead leaves underneath her, thinking instead of the warmth of her thighs radiating out into wendy's skin. wendy slumps a little further down the trunk of the tree, completely absorbed in the sanctuary she has escaped to with a simple click of the play button and the closing of her eyes.

\---

the bell rings sharply, even the noise-cancelling headphones wendy owns cannot hide fully the shrill of the bell that signals the end of lunch time.

she blinks open her eyes, panicking a little as she rushes to pack her things to get to her next class, at least 4 blocks away, on time. the slight commotion catches the peripheries of seulgi's vision so she turns slightly to see the red tresses of hair covering a girl's face as she scrambles to pick up all her belongings, the wires of her headphones tangling up a usually simple process. she ignores the little distraction, returns to pack her sketch pad and readies herself for class as well. as she prepares to leave, brushing off the stray leaves that have clung onto the back of her jeans, she spots a rectangular plastic cover, edges flirting with the rays of the sun glowing fading glowing, and bends over it pick it up. a little scratched, the cover acknowledges the habitual use of it, and the slip of paper that is stuck inside it complements its sentiments. seulgi walks to her class, turning the cover back and forth, analyzing its content (or lack thereof, save for the slip of paper).

autumn days & your longing gaze  
1\. the paper kites - bloom  
2\. the honey trees - to be with you  
3\. the tallest man on earth - the dreamer  
4\. the lumineers - stubborn love  
5\. youth - daughter  
6\. the middle east - blood  
.  
.  
.  
wen's / february 2013

seulgi stares at the spaced out, rather bubbly handwriting pasted on the mixtape's cover. she rubs her thumb against it curiously, it was the twenty-first century, right? iphones were the thing, right? she didn't happen to travel back in time with just a single lunch period, did she? if so, why was a student in her university carrying around a mixtape, a... walkman?

furrowing her eyebrows, she hopes the girl isn't some decades-old phantom haunting her, wanting to solve a curious mystery from years back for her, then she would be freed from the curse, sings songs of celebration and ends up falling in love with seulgi, her saviour, and lived happ-, snorting softly, nah, she thinks, a dreamer has her limits too.

\---

(there is no curse, only a girl who feels terribly empty, thinks she's cursed for being so clumsy, when she wants to put her mixtape back in her cover case when she reaches her class panting, only to realize it is not anywhere in her bag.)

\---

she searches the songs on the internet when she gets home, plugs in her earpiece as she spins half-heartedly around on her desk chair. the finger plucking of the guitar stills her, the backing of a second guitar riff adding colour to the tune and somewhere on she finds herself twirling her lead pencil above a blank piece of her sketchpad. a deep inhale, she flits her eyes from her pencil to the paper, and starts sketching. quick strokes moving up and down, black colouring on white. her fingers move nimbly, as if having a life of their own, a shading here, a shading there, light falling on tresses... she doesn't remember feeling like this before - in this kind of rush which she doesn't want to stop, kind of wants to continue letting the blood charging through her guide her fingers on and on...

she goes to sleep, the neurons in her head still swaying to the acoustic riffs in the new playlist in her computer that mimics the one on the paper. she falls asleep, thinking it would look a lot nicer if her sketch had a splash of red.

\---

the next day bears the dull weight of normalcy. seulgi trudges on to school, hands fidgeting with the empty cover as she glances around hoping to find its owner. a sigh escapes her softly - an extra errand to run. but she cannot seem to get rid of the tunes that loop in her head like the mixtape itself, the music stringing a tranquil setting in the woods seulgi wishes she could be in, though not alone.

\---

then there's wendy, still flustered over the vulnerability of her mixtape. it plays in her walkman as she heads for school but it does not escape her that what protects the tape is clearly not in her possession. she fidgets with her walkman, pads of her fingers running against the different buttons, though according to the rhythm of the music in her ears. maybe she should return to the places she visited in school the day before to find that missing cover.

\---

a splash of red colours her peripheries and seulgi turns her head so fast she almost feels an awkward sense of vertigo. it's probably her , she thinks, no one else still uses a walkman (she'll grow to love that eccentricity one day). no one else carries that kind of confidence to dye her hair red (one day she'll know it's because no one else pulls off red better than her).

"hey!"

"hey?"

"uhm, so i saw you yesterday sitting behind me at the oak tree in the field... and i think you dropped this while rushing to class!"

she's never seen this girl before but the girl's eyes carry so much emotions she almost mistakes herself as saving a life and not just returning a mixtape cover. wendy's eyes are glistening, huge orbs radiating gratitude. before anyone accuses seulgi of bullying, she hurries to press the cover against the soft palms of wendy's.

"i'm seulgi"

"thank you..."

a whimper edges out her lips as she rubs the cover lovingly, bites her lips to prevent breaking out into a sob. seulgi looks slightly bewildered. the girl should be damn glad her prettiness and seemingly pure soul make up for her peculiar behaviour.

a loud exhale, and wendy looks up from her mixtape to seulgi. she smiles (seulgi thinks she can look at it the rest of her life. she doesn't know she will.)

"i'm wendy."

\---

shuffling beneath the sheets, a hand palms the smoothness of it searchingly, a little flustered when she realizes they're empty, and cold. she sits up in haste, looks around and wonders where the other girl has gone to. the silence is deafening and she shuffles out, sleepily.

seulgi sits comfortably on a stool, sketching on an easel. she hurries to block it when she sees wendy coming out.

"morning baby."

"why are you up so early?"

"i wanted to finish my sketch, but it always feels like something is missing."

while seulgi admits wendy entering her life has changed the way she sketches, there was still something about this piece she could not pin to, like how some music lacked a vital instrument.

as days passed, she found herself relishing in the moment, the way wendy twirled around their floor to her favourite, now theirs, mixtape tunes. she relished in the way the wendy was not the perfect twirler like a ballerina but in the ungraceful way she cocked her head back while spinning and laughing, knowing fully well how bad she looked. it was in the way seulgi caught her humming so quietly she would have almost missed it if she didn't notice her enough (she always did), fingers tapping on the table as if playing the tune on the piano. it was in the way seulgi would stop the thrumming fingers, lace her fingers between hers and pull her up, chest to chest, and slow dance in their living room.

it was in the way seulgi had driven them down to the nearest woodland, running inside like lovers who were eloping, the gaudy walkman bouncing loudly in wendy's backpack, and had turned around to see wendy's eyes light up as she watched the sun radiate in and out the gaps of the canopy. she half tackled wendy towards the dense and damp undergrowth, just to tease her, only to swerve her around so seulgi would land on it instead and wendy would not end up dirty. she had remembered wendy laying against her chest, telling her how much her heartbeat sounded like her favourite song.

" _it could be my new mixtape._ "

\---

all these flashes across her mind and seulgi looks up to see wendy still gazing at her, seulgi's arms still hiding the piece.

"it's not like i don't know it's about me anyway." wendy chuckles, and it's a lost cause, seulgi thinks.

her laughter and voice fills the air, and seulgi blinks with realization, with inspiration. she gets to work fast.

she thinks back to how wendy so easily lets "i love you's" roll off her tongue, how she reads all of her favourite love poetry with their perfect enjambment and accurate pauses, and how wendy's laughter has three levels - it starts with a miniature smile with short low gasps of giggles, before she opens her mouth a little wider, the whole row of teeth in view as she laughs a little more high pitched, before finally evolving to a monstrous unrestrained laughter so her uvula is in clear sight. it's how wendy tries to cover the songs on their favourite playlist and how seulgi thinks the cacophony of noises in the world can be shut out with just a simple voice, a simple tune, from a simple person. what had once made her shut out the world to begin her own sketching had now become the source for it, and seulgi is in some ways grateful. that spontaneity and rush of feelings that come with listening send her heart into palpitations, and her fingers don't cease moving.

\---

"here."

seulgi presents wendy with her sketch of her, one that is not a piece reflecting realism, but one that comes from the depths of seulgi's heart: free and moving strokes, various shadings to reflect the light in areas that make wendy shine the best and of course, the splash of red she has grown to know and love.

"it's beautiful," wendy replies, eyes glistening (as always, seulgi concludes,) while wrapping her arms around her. seulgi pulls her closer than ever before, fills her ears with wendy's raspy voice.

"just like you."


End file.
